Trees are like people, no two alike, depending where they grow and how old they are will make for differences in how the wood looks like.
Big older Maples have often darker centers, after all it is the dumping ground of the tree for unwanted materials, also storms will break tops out of them and decay comes in, but they do keep on growing, the old center wood is dead and only the outer shell is needed for it to continue growing, I’ve seen very large old Maples that had only the outer 6 inches or so still there when they got cut down.
I don’t know, but maybe the wood for floors might be steamed and then kiln dried making it more equal in coloration, anyway here are a couple pictures, the log cut up was from our next door neighbor, it was being cut up by some tree compagnie employees, as the tree grew on his front lawn it had a short stem and a lot of limbs, and they were cutting in-between those limbs, so some were pretty short pieces.
I stopped them and I was allowed to do take care of the log wood, as they took away the limbs and thin wood moving on to the next job, I hauled it all to my house and cut it all into blanks, and anchor sealed it all, took me all day to do and placed some sheets of plywood over it to keep the sun off of it, then stacked it in my shop out of the sun and wind, and started roughing it out, took a bunch to the turners guild, where the guild sold tickets and then draw them till it was all gone.
As this was a fairly young tree, planted some 40 years earlier and grew good with the fertilizing and watering of the lawn, that wood was pretty light in color, but did start to get the darker heart already as you can see in some of the blanks, also a large Maple crotch bowl 28” in finished size, where you can see the darker pith area of the limbs and a larger fruit bowl I turned from some Sugar Maple that shows the typical coloration of larger Maple tree wood.
This is a 28” sugar Maple bowl where it was much larger, but had to turn it down till I was below the pith of the limbs, as there was some splitting in it.
This was my next door neighbor’s Suga Maple that was cut down by a Tree service Co., some too short chunks as you can see, but the price was right ;-))
This bowl my youngest son has, used as a fruit bowl, it is a nice Sugar Maple shallow bowl, well liked and used.